Thursday, March 10, 2011

I know this bad boy has been available for some time and that pencil dorks all over have been snatching these up, but no one told me about it so I thought I'd help spread the word.

For the longest time, I've been looking for a travel friendly pencil sharpener that produced a nice long point like the electric sharpener I have at my desk. I've had to rely on clunky, messy, battery operated sharpeners or this piece of crap:

I hate those stock sharpeners so much that I just carry several pre-sharpened pencils with me or just stick to mechanical pencils when I'm on the go. For years I searched for a long point sharpener at brick and mortar art supply stores with no luck. It finally dawned on me to search online, and BEHOLD I've found the answer: the Kum Automatic Long Point

They're fairly cheap, easy to use, and travel well.

First off, here's the kind of point you get from a stock manual sharpener:

It's fat and won't last very long.

To sharpen a pencil using the long point sharpener, sharpen the pencil in hole 1 to remove the wood from the lead. You wind up with a rod of lead which is useful by itself for loose broad sketching or shading.

Then sharpen the pencil again in hole 2. This refines the lead rod into a desirable long point.

Here we have pencils sharpened with (from left to right): stock, kum long point, and an electric sharpener.

The Kum comes in a smidge shy of being as nice as an electric, but it's astronomically better than your standard manual sharpener.

Some folks complain about the stage 2 sharpener breaking their point off, but I have yet to have this happen. I've used the Kum for about 6 months now without issue.